January 21, 2009

Martin Luther King, Jr. and non-violence

On Monday we celebrated the birthday of Martin Luther King, and yesterday we watched the inauguration of our country's first black president. The symbolism was lost on no one, but I did want to mark these days in this space, and bring your attention to a part of Dr. King's legacy that is not quite as popular as his work of racial reconciliation.

Dr. King is one of my heroes, certainly because he stood up for the rights of his people who were being treated as less than human, but also because he so embodied the maxim that "no one is free when one is oppressed." His concern for human rights did not stop with the black community, but extended across cultural and national bounds to include people that his government was telling him were his "enemy." He realized that he could not preach non-violence to the black community without speaking against the violence that his own government was perpetrating against the people of Vietnam. He gave an excellent speech just 12 months before his assassination that beautifully and eloquently sums up his conclusion that "a time comes when silence is betrayal." The entire speech is a compelling read, but even better to listen to. You can find the complete text and audio here.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

But King's reasons for speaking out against the war were more than pragmatic, they were also deeply rooted in his Christian faith:

I... have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all [people]—for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved His enemies so fully that He died for them?

I have personally experienced the disconcerting concern of certain people who think that my concern for peace somehow takes me away from "the gospel," and I share King's bewilderment that any person who calls him- or herself a follower of Christ wouldn't see the connection. Another name for Christ is in fact "the Prince of Peace." And we need peace as much today as we did 2000 years ago, when Jesus was born under the brutal rule of a dictator who readily killed thousands of innocent babies in an attempt to extinguish this "Prince" (who wasn't even seeking political power, ironically enough) and as much as we needed King's prophetic words 40 years ago. In the words of an anonymous Iraqi nun, spoken in the buildup to the current Iraqi war, "we need peace more than we need bread."

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam" [and "Iraq."] It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of [people] the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that "America will be" are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

America is in as grave a need as ever for those who are willing to work for the "health of our land" and speak out not only about the unjust war we are waging in Iraq, but about our complicity in the situation in Gaza (those tanks, planes and guns that obliterated Gaza over the past few weeks were not Israeli, but American), our silence in the face of myriad humanitarian crises in Darfur, Zimbabwe, and the Congo (to name a few), our endless raping of our planet's natural resources, oh, I could go on. I love this country, and that's why I am committed to holding it's feet to the fire as much as I can.

And so it is with a heavy but hopeful heart that I welcome Barak Obama as our new president. Yesterday was an exciting day for me, probably as proud a day as I've had as an American. It was especially fun to share the excitement with Little C. We went to watch the inauguration at my sister's apartment with my mom and dear friend Kelcey and her daughter.

Obama won me over in the primary last January and I shared my personal reasons for voting for him in November here. I remain cautiously hopeful that he will be able to take our country in a new direction, with more just economic policy here at home, and more humble foreign policy. We shall see, we shall see... For now I am just thrilled to join my voice with so many of my fellow Americans (Republicans and Democrats alike) in celebrating the fact that our country really has come a long way in electing a black man (and bi-racial at that!) to the office of president. Racism isn't dead in our country, but this is certainly a decisive blow!

Little C showing her doll Abby the festivities of the inauguration, who seems to be clapping enthusiastically in response!

Kelcey doing a self-portrait with the prez at the town-wide inauguration party last night.

My cute mom (on the left, who organized the party) with Kelcey's mom, Linda. And we all know the man in the middle!

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Martin Luther King, Jr. and non-violence

On Monday we celebrated the birthday of Martin Luther King, and yesterday we watched the inauguration of our country's first black president. The symbolism was lost on no one, but I did want to mark these days in this space, and bring your attention to a part of Dr. King's legacy that is not quite as popular as his work of racial reconciliation.

Dr. King is one of my heroes, certainly because he stood up for the rights of his people who were being treated as less than human, but also because he so embodied the maxim that "no one is free when one is oppressed." His concern for human rights did not stop with the black community, but extended across cultural and national bounds to include people that his government was telling him were his "enemy." He realized that he could not preach non-violence to the black community without speaking against the violence that his own government was perpetrating against the people of Vietnam. He gave an excellent speech just 12 months before his assassination that beautifully and eloquently sums up his conclusion that "a time comes when silence is betrayal." The entire speech is a compelling read, but even better to listen to. You can find the complete text and audio here.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

But King's reasons for speaking out against the war were more than pragmatic, they were also deeply rooted in his Christian faith:

I... have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all [people]—for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved His enemies so fully that He died for them?

I have personally experienced the disconcerting concern of certain people who think that my concern for peace somehow takes me away from "the gospel," and I share King's bewilderment that any person who calls him- or herself a follower of Christ wouldn't see the connection. Another name for Christ is in fact "the Prince of Peace." And we need peace as much today as we did 2000 years ago, when Jesus was born under the brutal rule of a dictator who readily killed thousands of innocent babies in an attempt to extinguish this "Prince" (who wasn't even seeking political power, ironically enough) and as much as we needed King's prophetic words 40 years ago. In the words of an anonymous Iraqi nun, spoken in the buildup to the current Iraqi war, "we need peace more than we need bread."

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam" [and "Iraq."] It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of [people] the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that "America will be" are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

America is in as grave a need as ever for those who are willing to work for the "health of our land" and speak out not only about the unjust war we are waging in Iraq, but about our complicity in the situation in Gaza (those tanks, planes and guns that obliterated Gaza over the past few weeks were not Israeli, but American), our silence in the face of myriad humanitarian crises in Darfur, Zimbabwe, and the Congo (to name a few), our endless raping of our planet's natural resources, oh, I could go on. I love this country, and that's why I am committed to holding it's feet to the fire as much as I can.

And so it is with a heavy but hopeful heart that I welcome Barak Obama as our new president. Yesterday was an exciting day for me, probably as proud a day as I've had as an American. It was especially fun to share the excitement with Little C. We went to watch the inauguration at my sister's apartment with my mom and dear friend Kelcey and her daughter.

Obama won me over in the primary last January and I shared my personal reasons for voting for him in November here. I remain cautiously hopeful that he will be able to take our country in a new direction, with more just economic policy here at home, and more humble foreign policy. We shall see, we shall see... For now I am just thrilled to join my voice with so many of my fellow Americans (Republicans and Democrats alike) in celebrating the fact that our country really has come a long way in electing a black man (and bi-racial at that!) to the office of president. Racism isn't dead in our country, but this is certainly a decisive blow!

Little C showing her doll Abby the festivities of the inauguration, who seems to be clapping enthusiastically in response!

Kelcey doing a self-portrait with the prez at the town-wide inauguration party last night.

My cute mom (on the left, who organized the party) with Kelcey's mom, Linda. And we all know the man in the middle!